[Previous entry: "Essay progress"] [Next entry: "Damn Hackers"]

05/27/2008: "Global Madness"

Man, catching up on current affairs nowadays is SO depressing. Rising inflation and costs of living in Singapore, the Sichuan earthquake (amazingly it already has an ), the horrible situation in Myanmar with the even more horrible junta practically committing passive genocide with their non-attempts to help those suffering and focusing on their damn elections instead (I could rant so much about this but I won't here), the insane situation in Zimbabwea where apparently 80% of Zimbabweans are unemployed and hyperinflation is 100,000% a year... and even things are kind of nuts in Nottingham where two people recently got arrested for suspected terrorism in my uni on utterly ridiculous grounds, and according to a friend there was a recent stabbing in a fight between two gangs in the very centre of town.

Sometimes it's tempting to think of all these things as simply happening to "other people" in "other" parts of the world, but I've been coming to realise that things are so much closer and inter-connected than I used to think. In fact, the Zimbabwean situation reminded me of last September when I was helping out with the International Student Welcome Programme, and I had a teammate who originally hailed from Zimbabwe. He was describing how the situation in that country was so bad that the government had actually placed glass ceilings on the price of food there just so that the people could afford to buy food, and that as a result of that the people had all just rushed out and grabbed all the food they could lay their hands on to stock up before the prices rose again. And so he had walked into shop after shop that was literally cleaned out with absolutely NOTHING on the shelves because everything had been bought up. Things were so bad that he had to buy meat from across the border. That's right, HE ACTUALLY HAD TO BUY MEAT FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY. I... I just can't imagine living like that. That's just insane. The whole WORLD is going insane, really. Though as another friend of mine joked, that statement assumes the world was actually sane in the first place. Oh how that statement rings so true.

Growing up really sucks because it forces your ivory tower to crumble and the plummet to the ground isn't exactly a painless one. You start noticing all the things going on in the real world and realise just exactly how stupid and selfish and hopeless human beings can be. Because we never seem to learn.